This is better. There's a much clearer indication of a window in the room, and the early morning light with the incandescent light in the background makes a nice primary color palette. I got rid of a lot of physically accurate yet unnecessarily distracting shadows too. I may still bring out the hand holding the toothbrush a little more because there's not much contrast over there, but this is definitely enough to start shading. I did this with one diffuse pass that included shadows and then composited an ambient occlusion pass over it. Wish I could get a separate shadow pass that worked, but for one pass this is pretty good.
What's up with Maya's shadow pass anyway? I can't turn off self-shadowing (I set it to "ignore" but it doesn't). I'm ok with that except the rendered image has negative cast shadows and positive self shadows. If it were one way or the other for both kinds, that would be fine, but doing it both ways in the same image makes it completely unusable. How am I supposed to demonstrate compositing when I can't even get a shadow pass? If I had about $900 I'd upgrade to Maya 2008. Don't know if it's any better but it can't hurt. Maybe in a few months.
What's up with Maya's shadow pass anyway? I can't turn off self-shadowing (I set it to "ignore" but it doesn't). I'm ok with that except the rendered image has negative cast shadows and positive self shadows. If it were one way or the other for both kinds, that would be fine, but doing it both ways in the same image makes it completely unusable. How am I supposed to demonstrate compositing when I can't even get a shadow pass? If I had about $900 I'd upgrade to Maya 2008. Don't know if it's any better but it can't hurt. Maybe in a few months.
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